The Diary of a Nose Read Online Free PDF Page B

there; it’s nebulous, but it’s all I need.’
    Later in the evening, I open the book I am currently reading at page 141. As I turn the page I come across the word ‘nebulous.’ The word is following me. Nebulous is the idea I have in mind for the women’s perfume I have started work on. I know only that I want something floral, fruity and appetizing. Appetizing but not edible. Edible smells are lazy; something appetizing is exciting. ‘Appetizing’ is a word sufficiently evocative to be turned into a smell.

    Cabris, Sunday 21 February 2010
    Gardens
    I am thinking back to a question I was asked, at the ‘Creation’ seminar at the Paris School of Management, about whether I needed to visit the actual location when I was creating the Garden perfumes.
    When Hermès gave me the option, I remember saying it was not absolutely essential, a description of Leïla Menchari’s garden would be enough to fire my imagination. I thought my talent alone could identify the olfactory premise for the perfume that would become
Un Jardin en Méditerranée
.
    In the end, the company insisted I went there in person. I accepted. Before leaving I read nothing about the place so that I could tackle the project with an open mind. All the same, I expect I took a Giono paperback with me on this adventure as a talisman, to help ward off my usual feelings of anguish. I was given a kindly welcome. The garden I discovered was nothing like the one I had imagined sitting at my desk. Just as people take a box of watercolors with them to make sketches, I arrived with a wealth of smells in mind – North African flowers, fruits and woods – but no knowledge at all of the concept, layout or personality of an Arab garden.
    Beneath the cedars, eucalyptuses and palm trees shading long alleys, all my senses were bombarded. I was lost. My imagination was suddenly under assault and was soon taken prisoner by commonplace responses, banalities that I had to forget sothat I could learn to see the play of light and shade, smell the fig tree and the sea daffodils, listen to the song of water features and birds, touch sand and water. It took me three days to find and choose the premise for the perfume, to find the best way of expressing the shadiness and cool of that unique place.

    Cabris, Monday 22 February 2010
    Mint, still
    Discoloring mint by extraction using carbon dioxide gives a clear, pale yellow liquid just as I wanted, but accentuates the cut hay/dry grass aspect that I don’t want in this composition. I decide to work using only traditional essences of mint, favoring spearmint and pennyroyal, whose unrefined smell I find enchanting. I put to one side the spearmint-patchouli harmony for a future eau de toilette: it is a dark harmony better suited to that form of interpretation, whereas a cologne should be more vivacious and afford instant pleasure.
    I could work on a harmony of mint-petitgrain-bergamot-lemon, with the aim of achieving a classic cologne, but that construction lacks inventiveness and feels too banal to me. I try a new harmony by altering the proportion and intensity of each component. The blackcurrant base and the spearmint, which I use in abundance, have some common notes of equal intensity that harmonize well. Triplal is a powerful molecule with a hard, raw, green smell that needs handling with care. This compound gives an impression of cut leaves. By overdosing it in this composition, it partners and masks the spearmint’s ‘chewing gum’ effect.
    The blackcurrant-spearmint harmony was first used in
Eau d’orange verte
for Hermès, but at the time it was just one of the characteristics in this chypre composition, and not its dominantcharacter. Here, the idea is to bypass the citrus elements so that there is simply a startling impression of freshly cut mint: the first drafts are interesting.

    Cabris, Thursday 25 February 2010
    Fashion
    I do not consult the stars but readily turn to the nebulous blogosphere. There are a good many